SCHEDULE-MAKERS ARE FORCED TO BE CREATIVE

Not all Mountain West men’s basketball schedules, apparently, will be created equal.

The conference’s coaches and athletic directors met in Phoenix this week to hash out the particulars of an 18-game schedule in an 11-team league with rivalry, television and geographical considerations complicating an already intricate process.

The result: SDSU likely will continue playing UNLV and New Mexico twice a season even if it means a competitive disadvantage compared to the schedules of other schools.

The only way to create a balanced schedule is for all 11 basketball members (Hawaii is in for football only) to play each other once at home and once away, but that would mean 20 conference games. Instead the MW settled on 18, where you play eight teams twice and two teams once.

The question then becomes who gets to skip the trip to The Pit in Albuquerque, or UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center, or Viejas Arena, or whoever else happens to be among the conference’s elite that season.

The coaches voted 8-3 in favor of abandoning rivalry or television factors and simply letting computer algorithms do the heavy lifting, so that the home and road opponent you miss will rotate annually — ultimately evening out every five years. Then the athletic directors met and shook their heads.

A computer will still spit out a proposed schedule, but the conference now has “the flexibility,” in the words of SDSU Athletic Director Jim Sterk, to accommodate geographical rivalries or TV preferences. Meaning: Perennial powers like SDSU will play the top teams twice every year while lesser teams won’t.

That could have major implications in a conference where there have been six first-place ties in its 14-year history (including two three-way ties), where a game or two in the standings regularly has a huge impact on seeding at the conference tournament.

“What we want to do is build the league so we have multiple (NCAA Tournament) bids every year,” Sterk said. “We want to make sure that our RPI stays strong. If this helps us do that, I think that’s a positive. Plus there’s the national exposure on television. For me that was a selling point.”

Notable

The basketball coaches and athletic directors did agree on one thing: All 11 teams will make the conference tournament in Las Vegas, with the top five likely getting byes in the first round while the bottom six play. The men’s tournament is expected to run from Wednesday through Saturday … Kansas released its nonconference men’s schedule for next season, with the game against SDSU at Allen Fieldhouse set for Jan. 5, a Sunday.